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It’s tempting to read Aijaz Ahmad’s approach to translating Mirza Ghalib, giant of the modern Urdu-language ghazal, against his later Marxist criticism. Ahmad’s intro lays stress on Ghalib’s role as witness of a declining Mughal world being steamrolled by the British, and lends a postcolonial shading to the poet’s special brand of wistfulness. But his politics is really in the book’s approach to translation. Other translators have only interpreted the poems; Ahmad’s point is to change them. His apparatus for each ghazal includes an open-ended “literal translation”; a section explaining the key Urdu vocabulary he’s brought over into English; a General Explanation of each couplet, revealing the philosophy and theology behind the imagery; and two or three different translations from a pool of seven English-language poets. The poets aren’t ones I’d think of for an exploratory project like this: W.S. Merwin, William Stafford, Mark Strand, and Adrienne Rich don’t conjure up visions of radical advances in poetics. The beauty of Ahmad’s project though is that you can call them out for their complacencies and distortions, since you’re privy to the same text they worked from. By the same token, you end up giving credit where credit is due—Adrienne Rich stands out as especially deft at catching the thought at work behind the rainbows and flowers. The book’s interest finally extends beyond Ghalib to the possibilities of translation in general, though the ghazals appear here with a beauty and accuracy that’s hard to find anywhere else.

During his lifetime the Mughals were eclipsed and finally deposed by the British following the defeat of the Indian Revolt of 1857, events that he wrote of. Most notably, he wrote several ghazals during his life, which have since been interpreted and sung in many different ways by different people. In South Asia, he is considered to be one of the most popular and influential poets of the Urdu language. Ghalib today remains popular not only in India and Pakistan but also amongst diaspora communities around the world.